Not even two weeks after releasing iOS 5 Beta 6 to developers, Apple just released iOS 5 Beta 7. If you’re already on Beta 6, simply go to Settings > General > Software Update in order to update your iDevice. That is, unless you are jailbroken, in which case, you will not be able to update over-the-air. But you can always update via iTunes.

Seven beta versions for an iOS firmware is unheard of so far. Apple sure is polishing this new software, which should be released to the public in the next few weeks.

We have the full change log below…

Accounts

When creating an iCloud account, you can use any Apple ID as long as it is a full email address and not a MobileMe account. If you have a MobileMe account, you can move that account to iCloud. You can find more information on iCloud at: http://developer.apple.com/icloud

AirPlay

Starting in iOS 5, video content in applications and websites are AirPlay-enabled by default.

iOS 5 supports AirPlay of video via AV Foundation.

API Validation

NEW: Starting in iOS 5.0 development tools beta 7, it is possible to extract APIs used by an application and have them checked for private APIs usage. This option will be offered at Validation time.

Apple TV

Apple TV Software beta enables users to mirror the contents of an iPad 2 to an Apple TV (2nd generation) using AirPlay. This beta software also enables Photo Stream on Apple TV so users can access photos stored in iCloud. Apple TV Software beta is being provided to test the latest AirPlay functionality with your iOS 5 apps and web sites. If you wish to install Apple TV Software beta on your device, you must first register your device UDID in the iOS Developer Program Portal.

Slideshow settings are not remembered for slideshow playback (always plays back in Reflections theme). Screen savers settings are behaving properly.

Binary Compatibility

On applications linked against the iOS 5.0 SDK, scroll view content offsets will no longer be rounded to integral pixels during a pinch gesture.

Calendar

Birthday calendars are not currently available via the icloud.com website or in Windows. They will be available in a future release.

iBooks

iBooks 1.2.2 may fail to display some text or images in books. Please update to iBooks 1.3 in the App Store.

iCloud Backup

If you enable iCloud Backup, automatic backup with iTunes when syncing will be disabled. We also suggest that you manually back up your device with iTunes. Backups made with earlier versions of iOS 5 beta will soon become incompatible, and will no longer be available. It is strongly advised you upgrade to this version of the iOS 5 beta in order to continue backing up your devices.

iCloud Storage

NEW: Starting in iOS 5 beta 7, the requirements for specifying container identifier strings in your application’s entitlements have changed. Each container identifier that does not include a wildcard character must exactly match the bundle identifier of an application published using the same team ID as your application. You are not required to include an entitlement that matches your app’s own bundle identifier; for example, a lite and pro version of your app could both specify the pro app’s bundle identifier to share the same container. The requirements for container identifiers that include wildcard characters have not changed, but you may need to update existing wildcard identifiers after changing any non-wildcard identifiers in your application’s entitlements to match the new rules.

NEW: In this beta of iOS 5.0 the number of times an app can synchronize in quick succession with the servers has been reduced. If you are debugging your app and want to see whether your synchronize requests are being throttled, you can call the -[NSUbiquitousKeyValueStore _printDebugDescription] method directly in gdb. Please note that -[NSUbiquitousKeyValueStore _printDebugDescription] is an SPI so you are strongly advised not to use it in your app.

On KVS, the per-key limit has been raised to 64Kb (to match the per-app limit); and the maximum number of keys has been raised to 256.

During the iOS 5 beta period, any documents stored on the servers might be purged periodically before GM. Therefore, it is highly recommended that you do not store any critical documents or information on the servers.

Provisioning Profiles no longer need to be enabled for iCloud in the iOS Provisioning Portal. All newly generated provisioning profiles are now automatically enabled for iCloud. If you are using an Xcode managed Team Provisioning Profile, click refresh in the Xcode Organizer to obtain a new iCloud-enabled profile. To enable all other provisioning profiles for iCloud, simply regenerate your profiles in the iOS Provisioning Portal.

To use iCloud prior to beta 5, you had to manually specify various container identifiers (your application’s Display set) within an Entitlements file for both of your Mac OS X and iOS projects.Starting in beta 5, to enable iCloud storage within your apps, simply click the “Enable Entitlements” checkbox in the Summary pane of your project. Xcode will create a custom entitlements file for your project that automatically includes your Team ID. You can add additional iCloud Container values as required by your application. (Note that you must regenerate your existing provisioning profiles, either with Xcode or in the iOS Provisioning Portal, to use iCloud storage.)If you specify a custom identifier string for your iCloud Key-Value Store or iCloud Container entitlement values, you no longer need to prepend your Team ID to the beginning of the string. Xcode will prepend your Team ID to these entries automatically

The container identifier string you pass to the URLForUbiquityContainerIdentifier: method of NSFileManager MUST include the team ID at the beginning of the string. As a convenience, if you pass nil, Foundation uses the first document container ID specified in your app’s entitlements.

There are issues using the Cloud Storage document API in conjunction with protected data which can lead to data corruption.

In this beta, file presenters (objects that adopt the NSFilePresenter protocol) do not receive some of the messages that they’re supposed to receive, especially:

While reporting a bug related to the iCloud storage interfaces, please include the logs collected during your debugging session. To generate these logs, you must install a special debug profile on your device.The debug profile can be obtained from http://connect.apple.com. This profile enables the generation of debug logs that are needed to diagnose any problems using iCloud storage. The instructions to collect the logs are:

Install the profile. (The easiest way to do this is to mail it to yourself and open the attachment on their device.)

Reproduce the bug.

Sync with iTunes to pull the logs off your device.

Attach the logs to your bug report. You can find the logs in ~/Library/Logs/CrashReporter/MobileDevice/DeviceName/DiagnosticLogs.

These logs can grow large very quickly, so you should remove the profile after you have reproduced the problem and pulled the logs for the bug report.

File names are case-insensitive in OS X but case-sensitive in iOS. This can lead to problems when syncing files between the two. You should take steps on iOS to avoid creating files whose names differ only by case.

Find My iPhone

After OTA update Find My iPhone does not work. To make it functional you can toggle the the Find My iPhone from OFF to ON in Settings.

GameKit

NEW: Auto-matching with the Turn-based view controller does not work. Invites or the direct auto-match API can be used as a workaround.

Match data for turn based matches is currently limited to 4 KB of data.

FIXED: Events will be passed to the delegate whenever a turn is made on a match, instead of just when it becomes the local player’s turn.

iMessage

iMessage beta 1 will be unable to communicate with iMessage users on beta 2 or later.

FIXED:Setup Assistant does not provide AppleID password as an input for the FaceTime in iMessage.

interface Builder

FIXED: When editing the value of a constraint in the inspector, the constraint remains selected, and the outline view continues to show the constraint as selected.

In XCode 4.2 when copying views (either a single view or multiple views), both the user defined constraints directly on the selected view and the user defined constraints between the views being copied are copied to the pasteboard.

Changing the segment style of an NSSegmentedControl object to “Automatic” might crash in documents using Cocoa Auto Layout. To workaround the issue use an explicit segment style such as Round or Textured, and at runtime, change the segment style to automatic using the setSegmentStyle: method.

iTunes

NEW: When trying to restore an iPhone 3GS or iPod touch 3rd generation device running Beta 6 to Beta 7 using iTunes, you will have to set the device into DFU or you can OTA update to Beta 7. To enter DFU mode you will have to:

Connect the device to USB on your Mac.

Turn the device off.

Launch iTunes on your Mac.

Hold down the Home and Power buttons for 10 seconds.

Continue holding the Home button but let go of the Power button.

Hold Home button for 13 seconds or until the device shows up in iTunes.

The version of iTunes that comes with beta 7 cannot sync devices that have the beta 6 software installed. To avoid this problem, do the following:

Sync any devices that have beta 6 installed to the version of iTunes that came with beta 6.

Upgrade iTunes to the version that comes with beta 7.

Connect the device and install the beta 7 software. (Understand that you might see a failure to sync error when you first connect the device.)

After installing the beta 7 software, restore from your the backup you made in step 1.

Mail

When changing the host name of an email account in settings, blank messages may be seen in the unified inbox. As a workaround, delete and re-add the account instead of changing its host name.

Music Player

When deleting a song or video from Music/Videos on the device it crashes the app.

OpenGLES

FIXED: After the lighting stage, whether lighting is enabled or not, the resulting color values are not clamped in GLKit/GLKEffects with either GLKLightingTypePerVertex or GLKLightingTypePerPixel set on the effect. As a result it is not uncommon to see differences in lighting between the two, especially when multiple lights are enabled. This differs from OpenGLES 1.1 which clamps color values after the lighting stage regardless of whether or not lighting is enabled.

OTA Software Update

Users who installed iOS 5 beta 6 over the air from iOS 5 beta 3 must first erase all content and settings by choosing Settings > General > Reset > Erase All Content and Settings in order to install iOS 5 beta 7 over the air. This only impacts users who did not update to iOS 5 beta 4.

If you are doing an OTA software update, you will need to re-sync your photos with iTunes.”

FIXED: There may be some cases where purchases from the App Store or iTunes Store appear to be stalled because the device is downloading something else in the background. A workaround is to disconnect the device from power (unplug the device).

NEW: If you have a passcode set, it must be removed before updating to seed 7 from previous seeds. It can be re-enabled after the update is complete. Failure to do so may require iMessage to be re-enabled in settings.

Reminders

FIXED: If reminders syncing is enabled for a Yahoo account and there is no reminders collection on the server, it will continually get recreated by the phone. Due to a Yahoo server bug, that collection will show up as an event calendar.

Security

In iOS 5.0 signing of certificates with MD5 signatures is not supported. Please ensure that certificates use signature algorithms based on SHA1 or SHA2.

Simulator

Springboard

Push and local notifications for apps appear in the new Notification Center in iOS 5. Notification Center displays notifications that are considered “unread.” In order to accommodate push and local notifications that have no “unread” status, developers can use their application badge count to trigger a clearing of notifications from Notification Center. When an application clears its badge count (by setting it to zero), iOS 5 will clear its notifications from Notification Center.

UI Automation

There is a known issue when using the performTaskOnHost API in a UI Automation script. If the task being performed with the API outputs excessively (say, thousands of lines of text) to standard out or standard error, the task may deadlock until the timeout is reached, at which point it will throw a javascript exception.

The lock() and unlock() functions of UIATarget have been replaced with the lockForDuration(<seconds>) function.

Starting in iOS 5 beta 2, you can now trigger the execution of an UI Automation script on an iOS device from the host terminal by using the instruments tool. The command is:

instruments -w <device id> -t <template> <application>

When using the cli instruments for UI Automation you can now target the default Automation Template and pass the script and results path into the tool as environment variable options. For example:

Using the UIWebView class in Interface Builder, setting transparent background color is possible in iOS 5. Developers compiling against the new SDK can check their XIB for the UIWebView transparent setting.

In the iOS 5 beta, the UINavigationBar, UIToolbar, and UITabBar implementations have changed so that the drawRect: method is not called on instances of these classes unless it is implemented in a subclass. Apps that have re-implemented drawRect: in a category on any of these classes will find that the drawRect: method isn’t called. UIKit does link-checking to keep the method from being called in apps linked before iOS 5 but does not support this design on iOS 5 or later. Apps can either:

Use the customization API for bars that in iOS 5 and later, which is the preferred way.

Subclass UINavigationBar (or the other bar classes) and override drawRect: in the subclass.

NEW: In releases prior to iOS 5.0, the UIPopoverController class would unconditionally set the autoresizing masks of view controllers which were the content view controller of the popover controller. It would also unconditionally set the autoresizing masks of the views of view controllers pushed on to a UINavigationController object which was the content view controller of the popover controller.In iOS 5.0, the UIPopoverController class will no longer do this for applications linked on iOS 5.0 or later. Developers should ensure that the autoresizing masks of views are set properly to allow for arbitrary resizing within any container, not just popovers. A mask of (UIViewAutoresizingFlexibleWidth | UIViewAutoresizingFlexibleHeight) would not be unreasonable.

Safari and WebKit

In iOS 5, a new inherited CSS property, -webkit-overflow-scrolling, is available. The value touch allows the web developer to opt in to native-style scrolling in an overflow:scroll element. The default value for this property is auto, which allows single-finger scrolling without momentum.

The WebKit framework has picked up a newer WebKit engine, which closely matches Safari 5.1. Some areas to be aware of with the new WebKit framework on iOS:

There is a new HTML5-compliant parser.

Text layout width may change slightly because word-rounding behavior now has floating-point-based precision.

There is improved validation of the <input type=number> form field, which includes removing leading zeros and number formatting.

Touch events are now supported on input fields.

window.onerror is now supported.

There is a new user agent that does not have locale information in the User Agent string.

URLs are now canonicalized by making the scheme all lowercase. If a fake URL is used to pass information from a UIWebView back to native code, make sure that the scheme is always lowercase, or that the native code compares the scheme in a case-insensitive manner.

Wi-Fi Syncing

In iOS 5 beta 4 and later, wireless syncing is now available on Windows as well as the Mac. (This support requires OS X 10.6.8 or Lion.) You will see an option to enable wireless syncing when you connect your device to iTunes with the USB cable. It is recommended you perform your initial sync with a cable after restoring your device.

Wireless syncing is triggered automatically when the device is connected to power and on the same network as the paired computer. Or, you can manually trigger a sync from iTunes or from Settings > General > iTunes Sync (same network as paired computer required).

If you find issues with apps, media and/or photos synced to your device, you can reset then resync. From Settings > General > Reset, choose Erase all Content and Settings. Then reconnect to iTunes and sync again.

Xcode

NEW: Starting with Xcode 4.2 in iOS 5.0 beta 7, support to run and debug applications in the iOS 4.3 Simulator and on devices with iOS versions older than 4.2 is made optional and installed on demand. This support is no longer shipped as part of the core tools packaging, and made available for download and installation through the “Downloads” pane of the Xcode Preferences panel. A valid iOS developer ADC account is required to obtain this content.To obtain the iOS 4.3 Simulator, select the “More Simulators…” item from the Run Destinations popup in the main toolbar. This will present the Downloads pane of the Preferences with UI to initiate the installation of the simulator.To obtain iOS device support for pre-iOS 4.2 devices, connect a device and activate it for development in the Organizer. Xcode will provide a prompt to initiate the download of the device support components.If the Xcode 4.2 in iOS 5.0 beta 7 is installed over a previous Xcode 4.2 beta or Xcode 4.1, the iOS 4.3 Simulator and device support from the previous install will already be present, and the additional components will display as “Installed” in the Downloads pane of the Xcode Preferences.The installation packages for the downloaded components will be stored in ~Library/Developer/Xcode. When a new version of Xcode (beta or GM) will be installed, subsequent requests to install these components will use the local packages without requiring a new download.

In some cases, Xcode 4.2 Organizer does not display a device that is in restore mode. As a workaround you can use iTunes to restore.

In iOS 5 beta 5, iOS Simulator is not compatible with previous releases of the iCloud Developer Seed for OS X. It is highly recommended that you update to the latest iCloud Developer Seed to ensure compatibility.

iOS 5.0 SDK supports both iOS 4.3 and iOS 5.0 simulators.

Of course, this is for developers only, or for those of you who like to know what Apple is up to.

Make sure to let us know if you find anything interesting in iOS 5 Beta 7.